Lost Gillingham

The town of Gillingham in Kent grew up around the Royal Navy’s Chatham Dockyard. By the River Medway, this had been an important maritime area for centuries but it was only in the nineteenth century that the small settlement grew into a town. A large proportion of the town’s workforce and businesses depended on the dockyard, so its closure in the 1980s meant that the town had to rethink its focus....